


A Better Fit

by Pic_Akai



Category: Cabin Pressure, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-27
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pic_Akai/pseuds/Pic_Akai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martin Crieff and Sherlock Holmes discover they were swapped as babies. (Cracky premise treated seriously.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually something I wrote in a few days half a year ago. I decided to get it betaed as an experiment (I haven't ever used a beta before, in eleven years of fic writing) but after the first chapter came through both my beta and I stopped responding to each other (due, I'm pretty sure, to lack of time on both sides) and it's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. I decided to post it now and just go for it like I do the rest of my work. The first chapter does have some minor amendments which you may thank oleandraceae for, though I chose to ignore some of her suggestions too and you'll never know which bits were which!
> 
> Those of you who don't like WIPs may note that this is long completed and I plan to post the chapters regularly.

Martin Crieff woke up one afternoon in mid-February, still tired from the previous few days' flying though he had slept for ten hours since he'd arrived home. He made his way slowly down two flights of stairs, heading for the kitchen, thankful that the students he lived with had been quiet this morning. He passed the table at the bottom of the stairs where the post was put by common consent, and picked up the two letters that were there.

As he waited for the kettle to boil, he opened the first letter. He guessed - and was proved correct - that it was a bank statement, sent to remind him how much money he didn't have. He turned his attention to the second letter, which was when he became abruptly very awake.

The envelope was addressed in unfamiliar handwriting, and gave no clues away as to its contents. The letter itself, however, though clearly a photocopy, was written in his mum's handwriting.

Martin's mum had been dead for three weeks. _Three and a half now_ , he thought to himself, staring at the familiar spiky letters but not making any sense out of them yet. They had had the funeral two weeks ago. He hadn't yet started to adjust to the knowledge that she was gone, but he'd begun to be able to function again without someone pushing him around and telling him what to do.

That was, until the letter appeared.

Her death itself had been an accident, a freak fall down some steep steps at work which led to a cerebral haemorrhage. She'd been doing a night shift at the hospital and it might have been the best place to be found, if it were in time, but she was dead by the time someone came across her.

Did the letter mean she'd planned it? Was it a suicide, and this her note? Martin felt sick, and the hand which held the letter began to shake slightly. But how could someone plan falling down steps? You'd never know whether it would leave you with a broken leg, paralysis, a coma or otherwise. If she'd wanted to commit suicide there were loads of easier ways to do it, and being a nurse, she'd seen most of the attempted methods before.

Maybe she wanted to make it look like an accident, though. But surely there had to be easier ways than taking the risk. Maybe - he let himself wonder about every possibility, because all of it was crazy - the letter meant she wasn't actually dead. She'd faked it somehow. He knew Simon had gone to see her body to confirm it was her, and Caitlin had looked in when she'd been done up by the coroner - Martin hadn't wanted to - but maybe they were in on it, too.

It was stupid to give himself false hope, though. It must be something else, some really badly timed mishap with the post office. She'd probably sent it two months ago, passing on a ten pound note from his aunt who still sent a card at Christmas every year with a tenner for each of the children, despite the fact that they were all in their thirties now and none of them had been living at home for a decade or so. The sort of luck which meant the letter would turn up now, just after mum had died, that was Martin's sort.

He realised he was going to have to read the letter to make any sense out of it, and slowly held it up again, balancing his shaking hand on his knee.

_19/05/07_

_Dear boys,_

_I am writing to two of you here, though I'll send you separate copies. I don't know when you will receive this; as I write I'm in good health, but I'll be instructing my solicitor to send these to you upon my death. Hopefully, Martin, you will already know about my death by the time this letter arrives. Sherlock, I doubt you will, and you'll probably be quite confused about why the death of a stranger should affect you, but please read on and things will become clear._

_Before I continue, I should clarify that this letter is written to both Martin Crieff and Sherlock Holmes._

_I have to make a difficult confession to both of you. The only reason it comes now is because before her death, Mrs Melliflua Holmes and I agreed that we would tell you the truth once we had all passed away - I mean, all of your parents. At the time of writing, my husband Trevor Crieff has recently died, so I am the only person left who can give you the details of this story._

_I'm aware that this is going to come as quite a shock, and I apologise for that. We kept it a secret because it can't affect you if you don't know, but as there are some circumstances where the information might become necessary later - medical reasons or that sort of thing - we felt we had to give it to you eventually._

_Both of you were born in the summer of 1976, a few days apart. Martin was born three days before Sherlock. At the time, both our family - the Crieffs, who at the time were myself, Trevor and Simon - and the Holmes family - Melliflua, Samuel and Mycroft - lived in Leversham, a small village in Suffolk. Martin won't remember the village as we moved while he was still quite young, but I'm not sure about Sherlock. It was the type of place where everybody knew everybody else's business, whether they wanted to or not._

_Our families only made contact as Trevor did some electrical work for the Holmes family, when both of you were about five months old. He noticed their baby, Sherlock, and mentioned his own son was about the same age. He and Melliflua spoke a lot about the babies while he worked._

_For our own family, our new child was of course much loved, but quite difficult to understand, after our experience with Simon. He was often very agitated and unhappy with his surroundings. He was very alert for a child of his age from almost the first day, and didn't sleep nearly as much as most babies did. If he was paid attention he would usually fuss less, but he seemed to need constant stimulation, otherwise he would be very upset. He also developed abnormally quickly, holding his own head up, sitting unaided and beginning to crawl much earlier than normal._

_I don't have as much detail about the Holmeses's new baby, but from what I remember the family were concerned that he was developing slowly, though he was still within the normal range. He slept as often as most babies, but could often be fussy when he was awake if too much was going on or there were too many people around._

_You have to understand that it was a huge struggle for both of us. Both families loved our new sons, but you were difficult for us to adjust to. That was only highlighted more when we recognised that Martin was more like the baby the Holmeses had been expecting, and Sherlock was more like the baby we were expecting._

_There is no easy way for me to tell you this, so I'll get it over with. When you were six months old, we swapped you. I know this sounds like the plot of a ridiculous film, but that is what happened. It wasn't an easy decision and it wasn't made lightly. Trevor had been speaking to me about the conversations he had been having with Melliflua while working, and she had been talking to Samuel as well. The four of us met up, along with you two, for the first time about a week after the job ended._

_It just seemed so much better this way. I know you will probably be angry with us, and hurt, but you have to remember that none of us did this with bad motivations. We wanted to give both of you the best chance to succeed in life, and you fit much better in the opposite families to which you were born. We obviously don't know how different things would have been if you had stayed with your biological parents, but we believed - and I still do - that things were easier this way._

_We didn't make any obvious legal changes, no adoptions. We just swapped you two over. We met up one last time as a group and myself and Trevor went home with the baby that had been Sherlock, and Melliflua and Samuel went home with the baby that had been Martin. Samuel managed to get some records altered through a friend, under the radar, so that there wouldn't be any strange medical differences later like blood types suddenly changing. So technically, Martin, you were for the first six months of your life Sherlock Edmund Holmes, and Sherlock, for the first six months of your life you were Martin George Crieff._

_But you are just as much part of your families as you were before you read this, and speaking for myself, I still love both of you, even if I only really know one of you. I hope you won't take this too hard._

_With love,_

_Amy Crieff_

When he reached the end, Martin turned the last page over, to see if there was more. When it was clear there wasn't, he read the letter through again, as if it would make any more sense a second time.

The sickness hadn't eased. He knew now that his mum was definitely dead. Realistically he'd known she couldn't be alive, but the stupid naïve part of him had woken up at the possibility, and it died down again once that was taken away. He also knew that she hadn't planned a suicide, which was, in a way, comforting.

He was left with nothing new to process about her death and the way it had happened, but with something entirely different to process about himself.

It was several hours before he managed to make the tea.

* * * * *

Simon Crieff was not, as a rule, a man who liked surprises.

He liked them even less when they came in the form of his younger brother, arriving at the garage Simon owned with a face like a smacked arse and walking like he had truly convinced himself that this time, _this time_ , he would be able to take Simon on and win.

He'd seen Martin more times in the past month than he had in the past few years, and the prolonged exposure hadn't made any difference to their relationship. Martin was still as awkward as he'd ever been, and Simon could honestly say he was just as impatient about that as ever. He did love the irritating little brat, but still… He braced himself, standing back from the Camry he'd been inspecting and wiping his hands on a cloth out of habit, though there wasn't actually anything on them at the moment.

"Martin?" he greeted his brother.

"How _dare_ you?" Martin hissed at him, which put Simon on the back foot a little as he didn't actually know what it was he had dared to do. "How could you, Simon?"

He recognised the characteristic hitch in Martin's voice which meant he was about to start half-crying in anger, and there was no way he wanted to have this scene out in front of his employees - who'd already registered the fact that there was something a bit more interesting going on than replacing oil filters - so he headed quickly for his office, knowing that Martin would follow.

He shut the door behind his brother just as he started to speak again. "This is just _sick_ , Simon, really sick."

He paused, either to catch his breath or to gather up some more righteous indignation, and that was when Simon noticed the letter in his hand, so he snatched it from him. Martin made a stupid-sounding squeak and an abortive move to take it back off him, but then let his hand drift back to his side.

Simon scanned the first few lines with first raised eyebrows, then drawn ones. "Is this what you're on about?" he said, looking back up at his brother.

"You know it is," Martin fumed. He'd pulled himself together a bit, so it looked like the crying was off the table for now. "You sent it."

"Fuck off," Simon said with little heat, ignoring as he always did how uncomfortable Martin got at his casual swearing. "Why would I send you this? It doesn't even make any sense." He looked back at the letter, reading further. "Who are these people she's talking about? Is this actually from mum?"

Martin drew back a bit, the hand which had been a tight fist uncurling. "It's her handwriting," he said. "You really don't recognise it?"

"I've never read this before in my life," Simon said, going back to the letter. Martin stayed quiet as he finished reading it.

When he had, he looked up, dimly aware that the look on his face probably made him look like a total idiot. "Where's this from?"

"I received it yesterday in the post," Martin said. He took another step back, bumped into the desk, then leant awkwardly against it. "I - I assumed you'd sent it."

Simon frowned at him. "She died three weeks ago. Even if I were bothered about sending you stupid fake letters with ridiculous things in them, I wouldn't be doing it now, like this."

Martin nodded slowly. "Sorry," he said, back to his usual meek self. "I just couldn't see any other explanation for it."

He was like that, Martin. He'd convince himself about something and then go at it hammer and tongs, right up until the point when he was proved wrong and he deflated like an untied balloon. The single-mindedness would be a useful characteristic if he wasn't so good at reading things wrongly.

"So…do you think it's true?" Simon asked, skimming back over the letter. It was definitely mum's handwriting, and the date made sense for when she'd written it. That of course could have been made up afterwards, but he couldn't see a point to it. He thought about it, the logistics of the idea. Swapping babies over. It was mad, but then, so was mum. So she had been.

Martin was very quiet now. "I don't know what to think," he said. "You don't know anything about it?"

Simon thought back to see if he could recall overhearing anything, something that didn't fit. It all seemed normal, like Martin had always been a part of his life and just the way he was. Except…he frowned. One of his earliest memories, if not the earliest. He would have been about three, he thought. Going into the baby's room - as it was called up until Caitlin reached about five and declared she wasn't a baby any more - and seeing Martin in the cot. His mum had said something about his hair being brighter, and Simon had asked how it had changed colour.

He didn't remember her response, nor any more than that, but it was in the right time frame. In context with the letter it was a bit disturbing, and maybe it explained why it had stayed with him, despite seeming pretty ordinary up till now.

He recounted it to Martin, and then the two of them stood in silence for several minutes. When Simon remembered to look up again, Martin was paler than usual and digging his fingernails into his palm. Simon took a quick intake of breath; it startled Martin, who stumbled a bit despite the fact that he was leaning against the desk.

"I think…I think I'll go," Martin said, moving unsteadily towards the door. Simon didn't have anything useful to say, so he let him go and got back to work, telling the first bloke that made a joke about the expression on his brother's face to shut the fuck up.

* * * * *

Sherlock Holmes was beginning to become irritated. It had been several days since anything remotely interesting had happened. Even when he'd tried to engineer an interesting incident by bringing a hawk to Scotland Yard and trying to get it to fly around the main office, Lestrade had just opened his door and yelled at everyone to get out until Sherlock was finished with his attention seeking. Nobody had complained at being told to go and hang around in the corridor and the hawk had soon got bored with the place, preferring instead to try to nip at Sherlock's ear.

This lack of interesting incidents meant that, contrarily, he was getting even less inclined to do anything to find something which might occupy him. When the post arrived he ignored it, up until the point when John started nagging at him about it.

"That one's handwritten," John said, gesturing vaguely to the small pile on the table. Sherlock continued to stare at the ceiling. "Could be a case."

"Of course it could," Sherlock said, deciding to save the energy it would take to roll his eyes. He could use that energy later for thinking up a better diversion than a hawk. Perhaps a land animal. A goat was too easily herded…a yak? No, it had to be something he could get past the front desk without being stopped. Maybe several somethings…

"So, it could be an interesting case. You're bored, might as well see if it's worthwhile."

"The ones that write are rarely worthwhile," Sherlock snapped. "It's all women over fifty who say they want to know if their husband is cheating on them when a five year old could correctly interpret the signs; what they actually want is for me to lie to them and say no, of course, he loves you just as much as he did the day you married. Or they've lost some important piece of jewellery and it turns out to have been stolen - by the sink." Even as he spoke he ripped open the letter, because doing so would shut John up about it and then maybe Sherlock could use him as a better sounding board for the ideas about which animals to use. Bees sounded like a nice idea, but carrying the hive would be problematic, to say the least…

He scanned the first paragraph of the letter, stopping at the point where its author told him he would be confused. "As I thought, written by an imbecile," he said, and dropped it.

John looked at the letter. "Husband cheating or lost jewellery?"

"A dead stranger," Sherlock told him, rubbing the palms of his hands at his temples. "What is the largest animal you could conceivably conceal under your clothing?"

"Probably a rabbit, or a small dog," John replied without much thought. His lack of imagination was endlessly frustrating. "Can I read it?"

Sherlock waved a hand magnanimously at him and considered ferrets.

A few minutes later, John spoke, and Sherlock was pulled momentarily from his thoughts by the curious tone in his voice. "Sherlock, I think you'd better read this."

"They're never as interesting as they seem, John," he huffed, but John shook his head.

"No, I think this one might be. It's not actually from a client, anyway. It's about you. Supposedly."

"A fan letter, then. Dull."

"Nope…not that either." Sherlock hoped he was going to shut up soon. "I'll just read it to you, shall I?" The hope was clearly in vain.

John read the letter, and Sherlock paid attention only because otherwise, John would read it again. He became actively interested in it only at the point when mummy's name was mentioned. When he'd finished reading, John remained blessedly quiet for several minutes.

"Sherlock?" he eventually spoke. "What are you thinking?"

"I am thinking a great number of things," Sherlock replied. His thoughts about the right animal had been shifted to the back burner for the time being, but they were still there. Higher in the processing order was the idea that he had been a member of a different family at the beginning of his life.

He held out a hand for the letter, and John passed it over. He couldn't deduce much from it, as it was a photocopy, but the handwriting itself at least confirmed that it had been written by a woman in her late fifties or early sixties. He picked up the envelope; it had been posted outside of London. The letter had been copied several years before the envelope was addressed, so the date could easily be true.

Whether the story within the letter could be true, however, was something else altogether.

"Do you think it's true?" John asked him after another pause.

Sherlock moved to standing from his reclined position in one fluid movement. "I haven't decided," he said, and reached for his coat. "Mind the mouse; it's next to the salad." He left as quickly as he could, but heard John's sigh on his way down the stairs.


	2. Chapter 2

The day after speaking to Simon, Martin was on his way to Italy and losing even more catastrophically than usual to Douglas. His co-pilot had managed to think up seven new expressions of rhyming slang for flying terminology so far, and he hadn't managed one. Still, this was probably for the better, because he wasn't sure the cheese tray would agree with him anyway.

"Jack Bauer," Douglas announced, as Milan passed many miles beneath them.

Martin wasn't really listening, and it wasn't until Douglas said, "Really?" that he realised he was supposed to be pretending to be interested.

"Hm?" Martin said.

"Jack Bauer. Tower."

"Oh. Good one."

"Not really," Douglas said, with the self-effacing charm of a man who knows he can have all the cheese he wants, and doesn't need to brag about it here. "It's quite obvious, when you think about it. Are you all right?"

"Fine," Martin said. He hadn't even got the capacity to try to make it sound convincing, so it wasn't surprising when Douglas didn't believe him.

"I ask, Captain," Douglas said, "because for the past twelve minutes Arthur's been thinking up his first charade, after you agreed to play with him."

Martin's head snapped to the side. "Oh god, I didn't, did I?"

Douglas regarded him calmly. "No, you didn't, but the fact that you don't remember speaks volumes. What's going on, Martin?"

Martin sighed. "I don't - it's ridiculous," he said. "I've just had some…silly news, which isn't true, and even though I'm aware of that it's made me think about certain things. That's it." He pulled himself up smartly. "I'll be back to normal very soon."

"Is it something to do with your mum?" Douglas asked. Martin winced, but not for the reason Douglas thought. "I'm sorry, you don't have to explain if you don't want to."

"No, it's not that, it's…" He couldn't explain it even if he tried, anyway. He reached into the pocket of his Captain's jacket and took out the letter, folded and unfolded many times by now. "Here."

Martin was expecting the mocking to start long before Douglas reached the end, but it didn't. In fact, when Douglas did get there, he was unusually quiet. When Martin dared to look, Douglas was frowning vaguely off to the side. He then reached for the intercom. "Carolyn, could you come up here for a moment?"

Carolyn arrived a few seconds later, Arthur unsurprisingly on her heels. Martin watched in confusion as Douglas handed her the letter and said, "See what you think of this."

Martin watched her read it; she made some interesting facial expressions. When she'd finished, she looked hard at Martin, who glanced away.

"Where on earth did you get this?"

"Hang on, mum, I haven't finished," Arthur protested. She handed him the letter.

"It came in the post a couple of days ago."

"Where from?"

"I don't know," Martin shrugged.

"Have you heard of this woman before?"

Martin felt it was a bit unfair that he was being interrogated when he hadn't written the damn thing, but at least Carolyn was acting normally. "No, never."

"Well," she said. "That's a turn up for the books, isn't it?"

He looked at Carolyn, then Douglas. They both looked surprised rather than disbelieving. "It's probably just a stupid joke," he said. "I know it's not Simon, because I asked, but it could be Caitlin, or…"

"Caitlin, the mother of three small children who has recently lost her own mother - yours, too - playing an elaborate practical joke?" Carolyn scoffed at him.

"Wow!" Arthur exclaimed before Martin had the chance to admit that he was clutching at straws because the idea of it being true was just too weird. "This is amazing, Skip!"

"Arthur, shut up," Douglas said.

"No, but really! It's like a mystery adventure or something!"

"Except for the part where it isn't a mystery because we know, and it's not an adventure because this is Martin's real life." Carolyn took the letter back from her son and smacked him on the head with it a couple of times. "Do be quiet, idiot child."

"Sorry mum," Arthur said. "But before I do - aren't you even a little bit excited, Martin?"

Martin pulled a face at him. "What is there to be excited about? My own birth family didn't want me."

"Well -" Douglas began, but Carolyn broke in before he could continue, in a firm tone.

"But this other family did want you. Your family. They clearly thought you would be better off with them. Don't forget that bit."

"Yeah, and then they got to know me," Martin muttered. He knew that Carolyn and Douglas were exchanging glances behind his back, and tried to ignore it.

"So you have a whole other family you don't even know about," Arthur continued in his quest to find a silver lining to every cloud, no matter whether it was composed of rain or chlorine gas. "You could meet them!"

"Not really," Martin said. "From what it says there, both _Melliflua_ and Samuel are dead."

"Oh," Arthur said. "Well, maybe not them, then. But your brother, Mike, he's still alive. Probably."

"Mycroft," Carolyn corrected. "The names are the biggest indicator that this is probably true; nobody creating a hoax would make up such ludicrous names."

"They could be from another country," Douglas pointed out.

"You could be French and not even know it, Skip! Or Italian, or Polish, or Swedish, or -"

"Yes, thank you, Arthur, I get the point," Martin snapped his interruption. Arthur's list of possible nationalities subsided.

"He does have a point, though," Carolyn said, sounding reluctant to admit this. "There could be things about yourself you don't know."

"You mean apart from the fact that my life is a real-life version of The Parent Trap?"

"No, that's completely different," Douglas said. "They were twins. This is more…The Prince and the Pauper."

"No prizes for guessing which one I turned out to be."

There was a short, uncomfortable pause before Carolyn spoke again. "So what are you going to do about it?"

Martin shrugged. "I don't think there's anything I can do, is there? I don't have an address - and even if I did, the only person who's still even possibly alive is this Mycroft, and he might not even know about it. I mean, it's just so pointless. If she can't even give me any details, why bother telling me at all? This isn't even useful for medical purposes, it doesn't give -" he broke off in frustration, suddenly aware of how close he was to angry tears. "Please clear the flight deck," he said, as soon as he'd controlled himself. "We need to request a weather report."

He was grateful when nobody picked him up on the fact that they could request a weather report no matter who was around, and Carolyn and Arthur left the flight deck. Douglas, too, stayed mostly quiet for the rest of the flight, leaving Martin to try and corral his anger.

* * * * *

Mycroft Holmes was very fond of his younger brother, despite Sherlock's attempts over the years - both conscious and subconscious - to obliterate that fondness by way of being as irritating and troublesome as he could possibly be. The fondness was a matter of fact, and would not be changed. Nevertheless, its presence did not make Sherlock's behaviour any more palatable.

He kept an eye on his brother because god knew Sherlock couldn't be left to his own devices, though that was less of an issue these days since John had moved in. Still, when Sherlock suddenly disappeared for a day, running mostly off camera - he knew where the vast majority were, but hiding entirely in London was practically impossible - and John didn't seem alarmed, Mycroft recognised this unusual activity as warranting further investigation and made a journey to their flat.

For John's sake, he rang the doorbell before he made his way inside and up the stairs, dispatching his assistant to reassure Mrs Hudson that it was only him. He opened the door to the flat to find John in his usual chair, looking at a journal article but not reading it.

"Good afternoon, John," Mycroft greeted him, stopping just inside the door. He had found that John responded better to manners and polite requests than to displays of power; odd, for a man of his background, but it mattered very little.

"Mycroft," John said tonelessly, looking up. He waved a hand in the direction of Sherlock's chair, and Mycroft nodded his thanks as he accepted the invitation to sit. "Sherlock's not here."

John knew well enough that Mycroft knew that, but he was a man who often liked to get straight to the point of matters. Mycroft could do with a few more men like him in government. Not this particular man, however; he was doing a more useful job here than he would be in politics.

"He is currently somewhere between The Walker cricket ground and the London Metropolitan University," Mycroft informed John. "His precise whereabouts are unknown."

"That's quite a wide range, for you," John frowned. That, Mycroft thought, was putting it mildly. "Has there been a massive power cut I don't know about, or is he just trying to stay under the radar?"

"His evasive techniques are improving," Mycroft said. "I was hoping you might be able to explain why he is choosing to utilise them just now."

John held his breath for a moment, then blew it out. He looked consternated, though not actively fearful for Sherlock's safety. "He got a letter yesterday," John began, then seemed not to know how to continue. "It's on the table, there."

Mycroft went to the table to retrieve the letter. He remained standing as he read it, face naturally impassive. This was, however, going to cause a bit of bother. Not too much, but it had clearly been enough to upset Sherlock.

"Ah," Mycroft said, when he was ready to resume conversation again.

"Ah?" John repeated. "You don't sound very surprised about this, Mycroft."

The ire John was about to direct towards him - because he was the most acceptable target - was tiresome, but Mycroft comforted himself with the thought that it meant his brother had a fierce protector and friend, and he deserved that. "The essential details of the matter are not news to me."

"You knew?" John began to let his anger show, now. "You bloody knew, that he wasn't - since when?"

"Since the swap took place," Mycroft said evenly. "I was about seven years old at the time." Seven years, ten months and six days.

"How can you possibly justify keeping that information from him, all this time?"

"Be reasonable, John," Mycroft says, pointlessly. "You've seen his reaction to the news. What good would have come of it? Up until this letter, he believed himself a true member of our family - which he is, biology notwithstanding. Still, however logical Sherlock intends to be, there are times when emotion can…overcome him. Clearly he is unable to consider this rationally."

"Of course he isn't! It's not normal to receive that sort of news and just think oh well, swapped as a baby, all right then. Most normal people go off the bloody deep end because this is betrayal, and lies, and insane!"

Mycroft waited for a few moments before replying, "It made perfect sense -"

"To a bunch of lunatics!" John exploded. "Which I'm very prepared to believe your parents were, but how the hell they got this other family convinced to go along with it as well…" He turned away from Mycroft then, huffing out another breath, and tensed his hand. Obviously he was as emotionally invested in this as Sherlock seemed to be. This was going to make things even more complicated.

After a minute or so, John spoke again. "You could have told him," he said. "Rather than letting him find out through a letter from some woman he's never - well, some woman he hasn't met since he was six months old, because before that she was his mother."

"When do you think might have been a better time to break the news?" Mycroft challenged him.

John bristled. "There's never a good time for this. But it would have been better coming from his brother rather like this."

Mycroft disagreed, but there was little point arguing with John any further. Both knew the other's point of view and were not inclined to change their own.

"Anyway, doesn't this bother you, even a bit? You've got - a little brother out there, who just disappeared one day. Sherlock's got an entire family, or at least another brother."

"My family is Sherlock," Mycroft told him firmly. "Sherlock's family is me. We have enough difficulties as it is, do you really believe more relationships would make either of us any happier?"

He knew he'd said too much, but wasn't quite sure why. The news coming out had rattled him, even though he'd always known. "I'm afraid it's time I left," he said smoothly. "Please feel free to contact me if you have any further concerns about Sherlock."

"Why, so you can brush them under the carpet? No chance," John said. Mycroft continued to leave, though the barb stuck a little, just a tiny pinch on his skin.

* * * * *

"Ugh, Mycroft's been here," Sherlock commented as he entered the flat. That wasn't unexpected, give the circumstances, but the disgust ought to be voiced. "Have you disinfected since he left?"

"No, because he's your brother, not a leper," John replied calmly. He turned off the TV, which he hadn't been watching. "Where've you been?"

"Have we got any Bourbon Creams?" Sherlock asked as he divested himself of coat and scarf, ignoring the question because - as John's questions so often were - it was irrelevant.

John followed him through to the kitchen. Sherlock sat at the kitchen table, confident that John would continue through the process of making tea and finding biscuits, which he did. "What are you thinking about things, now?"

"I've decided to give up on animals," Sherlock announced. "At least, live ones, for the time being. Dead are still a possibility. I was thinking more perhaps a bomb scare, what do you think?"

"I think you're still mentally eight years old," John said, putting a saucer of pink wafers next to him. Sherlock frowned. "You finished the Bourbons." Life seemed to be a series of annoyances today. First Mycroft, now pink wafers. He bit down on one, hard, satisfied at the crumb spread it made around him.

"And how do you feel about the fact that your parents aren't who you thought they were?" John prodded. His having been a soldier was a great asset most of the time, but it did mean there were occasional moments like this, when he refused to let go of something that Sherlock really couldn't be bothered with.

"It's not the first lie my parents have told, and I daresay I'll discover others before I die." He dismantled the next biscuit with his fingers, trying to separate the layers in whole pieces. It was fiddly.

"Right, but how do you feel about it?"

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Despondent and suicidal, John. I'm questioning everything I ever thought I knew about myself and my identity has been shaken to the core." One layer broke in half and Sherlock ate it, relishing the loud crunch it made.

"Forgive me for assuming something might be a bit off when you disappear for over a day." John put a mug of tea down next to the biscuits and sat down across from Sherlock with his own mug.

Sherlock ignored that. He wasn't actually entirely sure how he felt, and John clearly expected some particular emotional response which Sherlock was bound not to adhere to. John had stayed with him, though, after countless occasions of Sherlock reacting wrongly, so by now he wasn't worried John would leave. And sometimes John actually identified how Sherlock felt before he did, and pointed it out to him, which was far preferable to Sherlock wasting processing power on it.

"It fits," Sherlock said instead. "The story's clearly not fraudulent."

"Yeah, Mycroft confirmed it."

Sherlock began dissembling another biscuit. "You still hoped it would be a lie, though."

John frowned and took a slow mouthful before he replied. "Well, for your sake I suppose, yeah."

"No need to worry about it," Sherlock dismissed. "It doesn't make any difference to my life."

John studied him for a few moments as he succeeded in separating each whole layer from the others. He didn't say anything more and Sherlock ate his wafers, satisfied.


	3. Chapter 3

Martin had thought about the situation extensively over the past few days - almost to the exclusion of anything else. Moving furniture and boxes about as well as driving in between gave a person a lot of time to think, and when he got home after one particularly long day, he'd made a decision.

After showering off a day's worth of sweat and grime, he sat down at his ancient desktop and opened Internet Explorer. He rarely went online because of how slow the computer was, but he had no idea how else to proceed.

He'd realised fairly soon after he'd told the rest of MJN about the letter that his assumptions about the other family - it didn't feel right to say _his_ other family, though technically they were - were probably wrong. He'd said that the only one possibly still alive was Mycroft, but that wasn't true. There was also the other baby, the other man, now. The baby who had been Martin and was now Sherlock.

Martin tried to imagine himself having the name Sherlock, and couldn't do it. Captain Sherlock Holmes sounded a bit absurd, but only because of the oddity of the first name. It _still_ sounded better than Captain Martin Crieff. Maybe he would have been a better pilot with that name, took less than seven goes to get his CPL…or maybe - much more likely - he would have been just as rubbish, and looked completely pathetic next to the rest of his family, who recognised him as an idiot even as a very small baby.

He knew it was probably a bad idea, trying to find them - his biological brother and the man he could have been, or at least whose house he could have lived in. But now that he knew about them, he felt he needed to know more. Most people didn't get any real-life information to answer their 'what if?'s, but Martin had someone here who would be living evidence. Possibly. He hoped so.

And a very small part of him, which he'd tried not to think about much, was wondering if he would feel any more at home with this other brother than he did with Simon and Caitlin. They'd never been particularly close, even less so since they moved out, and now that mum was dead he could easily see them drifting even further apart, until one year a Christmas would pass and he'd realise he hadn't sent even a card to either of them, nor them to him, and he wouldn't really miss them, just the thought of having a family. He had more of a family in MJN these days and there was a time when he would have been embarrassed to admit that, but not now.

When Google had loaded, he typed quickly into the search area and tapped enter without pausing, decisively. Even if this all ended badly, he would still have what he had now, and he could be happy enough with that.

He'd only been searching for about five minutes when his phone beeped, signalling the arrival of a text message. He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing, so he'd tried "how to find a long-lost family member" and "find a person with only a name" and could see that it was going to take a fair amount of work. However, the annoyance at that was immediately pushed aside to make room for fear when he read the message.

_From: Unknown number_

_Do not worry about executing further searches. Someone will be at your home in approximately an hour's time._

There was nothing to explain where the message had come from. Martin wasn't even aware it was possible to send a text without a number, but apparently it was. Somebody was obviously watching him, because they knew that he'd been searching, and they were coming to get him.

Except why would anyone want to come and get him? He turned slowly in his chair, looking nervously around his room at the total lack of hiding spaces for an adult. He went to the window and peered out; the street looked exactly the same as usual, nobody standing across the road in a trench coat with a hat pulled down over their eyes.

But they'd found out what he was doing online…quickly, he crossed the room in two steps and fell to his knees, pushing the chair out of the way so he could squirm under the desk and pull the plug out. He knew that wasn't the safest way to shut the computer down but it was so knackered it couldn't make much difference. Just in case, he pulled the wireless adapter out too.

Then he thought about what he should do. Should he ring the police? But that seemed like it was making a fuss about nothing, because all the text said was that someone would be coming to his house, not that they were coming to hurt him or kidnap him. He couldn't imagine why they'd want to, either.

And surely if they were intending to hurt him, they wouldn't give him an hour's head start. But they seemed quite confident that he was going to stay to wait for them, given that they'd told him instead of just turning up…did that mean there were people stationed outside waiting to catch him if he tried to make a run for it?

After another few minutes of worrying himself into a panic, he gave in to the inevitable and called Douglas. Asking Douglas to help him out was embarrassing at work but this was something else entirely.

Having been given the garbled lowdown of the situation, Douglas promised to be there as soon as he could. It was both reassuring that Douglas sounded so serious because it meant he was actually taking it seriously, and terrifying because it meant Martin probably wasn't just overreacting. He sat rigid in the computer chair for the next quarter of an hour, glancing between the door, the window, his phone and the computer, thinking about ever-more horrible scenarios.

When the knock at the door came, Martin jumped quite literally off the seat, but thankfully it was followed by, "Martin? It's me," which allowed Martin's heart to slow down to something more like rabbit pace rather than bumblebee.

"Come in," he called, hating the way his voice sounded and powerless to do anything about it, and Douglas did, stooping to get through the doorway. Martin was so worried he didn't even have time to think about how embarrassing it was for Douglas - with a house of his own, three ex-wives and a daughter he supported - to be here in his poky little attic.

They went over what Martin knew again, not that it made any difference, and made a quick but somewhat reassuring plan. Then Douglas sat down on Martin's bed to wait, and they said very little for a long while.

* * * * *

Mycroft hadn't been planning to make an impromptu visit to Fitton at six o clock on a Friday, but he had been prepared for the possibility that he would have to go there some time soon, on short notice. From the information he had gleaned about Martin Crieff, he was surprised that the man had chosen to act so quickly - he was, according to many who knew him, quite prone to dithering, unless panicked - but predicting someone's behaviour was never foolproof, especially when your knowledge about them was second-hand.

Installing the key logger on Martin's computer, keeping track of his whereabouts and the books he took out from the local library was easier than it had any right to be. Clearly the man had no understanding of security, but believed himself to be perfectly safe. He was remarkable only in the sense that he had managed to get himself into the 'job' he had now; he had little in the way of natural ability but a dogged determination, and that at least was something.

Hopefully, once they met, he would realise that they were as good as strangers and it would be kinder for all of them for things to remain that way. If it were only Mycroft involved in this affair, he wouldn't have bothered at all - hiding himself and his life from public view was a natural occurrence and would require no further effort - but since there was Sherlock, Mycroft felt it better to do things this way.

Putting Martin and either of his siblings on the defensive would quickly establish the way that any 'relationships' between them would go, and was best for all concerned. Allowing Martin to find Sherlock in his own time - and it wouldn't have taken too long, not with Sherlock's web site and the ever more amusing newspaper articles - would have led to disaster. No, Mycroft could orchestrate this easily enough, and the whole sorry business would be over with in a matter of weeks, if not less.

The car pulled up to the kerb outside Martin's grotty student house. It was admittedly rather better kept than some of the slums Sherlock had squatted in during his early twenties, partly out of spite towards Mycroft for when he visited, but it was still not anywhere a pilot should be living. Of course, Martin Crieff was only a pilot in name, and that just barely.

Mycroft rang the doorbell, and was presently greeted by a young woman in her pyjamas who smelled faintly of manure. She raised her eyebrows at him, which he took to mean they didn't bother with greetings around here.

"Hello," he said anyway, because manners were still important even if you were the only person who recognised that. "I'm here to see Mr Crieff."

"Bloody hell, he's popular tonight. Is he having a party up there or something?" She glanced Mycroft up and down. "Whatever it is, I don't think you're dressed for it."

Mycroft inclined his head. "May I speak to him, please?"

She shrugged a shoulder at him and opened the door wider, stepping back. He took this to mean, "Of course, come in." "Martin!" she bellowed in the direction of the stairs, jogging up them as she did so. "There's another man here for you! He's downstairs!" Mycroft heard a door shut soon after; she appeared to have exhausted herself with hostessing duties for the time being and had gone back to bed.

Mycroft closed the front door quietly behind him and stood waiting in the dingy hallway while two sets of feet made their way down two flights of stairs. Perhaps Martin had called his brother? But when they came into view, that notion was instantly dismissed; the other man with a suspicious look on his face was Martin's First Officer.

Martin stopped on the landing above Mycroft, looking at him with not a mild amount of fear. Douglas had apparently only slightly more patience than Mycroft, though had no qualms about showing it, because he paused for only a few moments before huffing and shoving Martin gently in the back, forcing him to descend the stairs.

"I've already got 999 dialled on my phone," was Martin's opening. He even turned the mobile around so Mycroft could see. "All I need to do is press one button and we can have the police here. And the students will hear if there's a row, so - so don't try anything."

"I'm sure I don't know what you imagine I might be about to try," Mycroft lied because it was a little fun, playing with this mouse, "but at any rate, there will be no need for the police. If there is I assure you I can have them here quicker than dialling the emergency services will get you."

"Got connections, have you?" the First Officer said. Douglas Richardson, a life almost as empty as Martin's but with a lot more swagger on the top to cover it up.

"As a matter of fact, yes," Mycroft said, sensing that playing was only going to antagonise this one further, and would therefore prolong the situation. "But I don't believe that's what you want to discuss. Is there somewhere we could…?"

Martin led them into the kitchen, glancing back at both of them as he did. He started to stutter something at the lone young man in there, but once he'd noticed both Douglas and Mycroft, he made a quick decision and simply left, taking the rest of his pasta bake with him.

They sat down at the scratched and stained table, Martin and Douglas on one side and Mycroft on the other.

Mycroft let Martin speak first. It took a while.

"How did you know what I was searching for?" Martin asked finally.

"I had a key logger installed on your computer a few days ago," Mycroft replied.

"You are aware that's illegal," Douglas said.

"I am aware that it can be," Mycroft returned, and trusted Douglas would know what he meant without Mycroft having to be so gauche as to spell it out.

"Who are you?" Martin asked - finally, a sensible question - in an irritatingly high pitch.

Mycroft gave the impression of straightening himself without actually doing so, because his posture was rarely less than excellent. "Mycroft Holmes," he said. He waited a moment to let this sink in. "You are Martin Crieff, and you are Douglas Richardson." He deliberately didn't use their titles, because there was no need here.

"How do you know where I live?"

"It's not difficult to discover where you live, Mr Crieff."

"Did you send that text message?" Douglas was possibly even more annoying than Martin, with his overprotective air and the self-assuredness that he would come out of this conversation on top, which was painfully misplaced. 

"It was sent on my behalf."

"So why send it from a blocked number with no name attached? You nearly frightened the life out of him!"

"Douglas!" Martin protested. "I wasn't -"

"Oh, shut up, Martin. Anybody would be disturbed if a stranger sent them a vague message basically saying they were coming to get them. What's your game?"

"I assure you, this isn't a game." Mycroft turned his attention to Martin. "Recently you received a letter from the late Mrs Amy Crieff - your mother - explaining that your relationship was in fact a little more complex than it had thus far appeared. Sherlock Holmes received an identical letter on the same day. I gather that you wish to obtain more information about the letter's contents."

"Is it true?" Martin asked. Any fool could see that it was, but people seemed to need these things confirming out loud in this sort of situation.

"Yes," Mycroft said. "You were born Sherlock Edmund Holmes, and at six months old you became Martin George Crieff."

"You're my brother," Martin said, sounding dangerously close to sentimental.

Douglas appeared to have some issue with this, too, if the raised eyebrow he gave Martin was any indication.

"Quite," Mycroft said, and moved things along smartly. "I believe Sherlock would be interested in meeting with you." That would be true, once Mycroft got them in the same room. He knew Sherlock wouldn't be able to resist working out what had made the differences between them when he had all the evidence laid out in front of him. He also knew that Sherlock would be as uninterested in meeting Simon as Mycroft was in spending time with Martin, but there was no need to mention that.

"Yes," Martin said hurriedly. "I want to meet him, too. Both of you. Can we -"

They managed to arrange a meeting for the following Thursday. Mycroft foresaw a difficult conversation with Douglas about this, but to his surprise Martin was the one who said that he thought it should just be the siblings, at first, and Douglas acquiesced to that easily enough, even if he still looked at Mycroft like he was liable to slit either of their throats at any moment. Literally this was of course absurd, but metaphorically, Douglas had rather an astute perception of him.

Mycroft saw himself out once the meeting was confirmed, eager to avoid any rash attempts at physical contact which Martin might believe to be normal in this case, and turned his mind to convincing Sherlock to show up. Thank heaven this little mess hadn't happened during the presidential election.

* * * * *

Martin and Simon were the first to arrive at the café which had been agreed upon for their meeting. They hadn't even got in the door by the time Martin started worrying that it wasn't posh enough for Mycroft.

"He's probably never even been to somewhere like this. I should have suggested somewhere else, but I can't think where would be appropriate. They're coming from London; there must be all sorts of better places there. I should have offered for us to come to them."

"Martin, shut up," Simon said, leading the way to a table towards the back. The place was thankfully pretty empty at this time of day. It was going to be a weird meeting and the less people who overheard it, the better. "He offered to come here, right? Anyway, he'll survive sitting in a café for a bit. What do you want?"

He left Martin fussing nervously with the condiments on the table, and went to order two teas.

"Why do you care so much about impressing him, anyway?" Simon asked, putting the cups down and then signalling to Martin to shove up the bench.

"It's not that I want to impress him," Martin said, "it's just that I don't want him to think I'm…"

"Pathetic?" Simon guessed. He knew it was accurate when Martin's shoulders slumped. "Look, mate, let's be honest - you are quite pathetic." He ignored Martin's indignant squeak. "But you've done pretty good anyway, getting to be a pilot despite being so crap at it, so that's something. Anyway, from the sound of it if Sherlock's anything like Mycroft, you got the shit end of the deal in terms of wealth and background."

They both took mouthfuls of tea, and that was when the door opened to admit two of the most toffee-nosed bastards Simon had ever seen around here.

He nudged Martin with his shoulder, accidentally making him spill a bit of his tea. "That them, by any chance?" It obviously was, because the two men had clocked them as soon as they walked in the door, and were making a beeline for the table. Simon assumed the older-looking one was Mycroft, which meant the one who looked completely bored out of his head must be Sherlock, Simon's supposed new (old?) younger brother. Brilliant.

They reached the table, and stopped behind the bench. "Good evening," Mycroft - Simon assumed - said. "Martin, Simon." He nodded his head at both of them. "I'm Mycroft, and this is Sherlock." Sherlock was looking at the awful paintings behind their heads.

"Yeah, we figured," Simon said.

"Hello again," Martin said, sounding like he was talking to a hungry tiger rather than two blokes. "Pleased to meet you. Um, we didn't get you any drinks, because we didn't know what you'd like…"

"Not a problem," Mycroft said smarmily. "I'll just fetch us some. Sherlock, do sit down."

"Get some more sugar," Sherlock said to Mycroft's back as he folded himself onto the bench. "There isn't enough here." Simon looked down at the table and counted four sugar packets. What was he planning to do with them?

"So…" Sherlock began, and put all of his attention onto Simon. It was a bit creepy. "You're a mechanic. Well, you've moved up the ranks a bit now, so less work with your hands but you could still build an engine with your eyes closed. Management - your own garage? You've done well for yourself."

Simon gave him a look which he knew was what his wife called Monty's Look - it was what he used when the dog had just brought something half-alive in and then demonstrated how he could tear it apart on the kitchen floor as the kids shrieked. He was slightly surprised, and mostly wanted to throttle the bugger.

"Did Mycroft tell you about Simon, too?" Martin asked, unwittingly directing Sherlock's attention to him. That was a lot less surprising, then.

"No," Sherlock said. "I don't need my brother's background checks to find out about people. I observe."

"Oh," said Martin, who clearly didn't get that, and Simon wasn't sure he did either. Sherlock was probably just lying, trying to look impressive.

"Simon is also a father of two children, at least one in primary school. He has a medium-sized dog, probably a Staffordshire Bull Terrier. He doesn't -"

"Sherlock," Mycroft interrupted from the counter, "I know it's difficult for you to remember your manners when John isn't here to guide you, but do try."

Sherlock scowled at him. Simon was feeling pretty thankful for Martin right now. "I am perfectly capable of remembering insane social rules, Mycroft, I just choose not to employ them when they serve no purpose."

"By which you mean, when they are inconvenient to you." Mycroft thanked the woman behind the counter and carried two cups and a handful of sugar packets to the table. "I do apologise for Sherlock's behaviour; he hasn't quite managed to make it past the impulsive toddler stage yet."

Simon got the feeling that Mycroft couldn’t actually give a shit how rude Sherlock was, but it was bred into him to apologise anyway. He snorted, and held Sherlock's stare when Sherlock looked at him.

Mostly led by Mycroft - Simon would have felt annoyed about that if it weren't for the fact that he didn't have a clue how to talk about this craziness himself - they got into an uncomfortable conversation about their current lives, everybody carefully ignoring the reason why they were actually there.

Eventually, however, when Mycroft was in the middle of what was obviously a very whitewashed explanation of his job, Sherlock's boredom threshold was clearly crossed. He talked straight over his brother. "Where's your younger sibling?"

Mycroft gave a little sigh. Martin shared a quick glance with Simon.

"Caitlin wasn't interested," Simon said reluctantly. "She said she's got enough on her plate at the moment without adding another brother and she's planning on pretending the letter never even existed."

"She's feeling betrayed by your mother," Sherlock mused. "Yet you aren't. Interesting."

"Sherlock," Mycroft said warningly, but Sherlock seemed to be done on that subject for now.

"I -" Martin started, then stopped and turned red when everyone looked at him. Simon still couldn't work out how that much blood managed to get to his face so fast, and then wondered if Mycroft had the same problem. Nah, he'd probably had the need to blush beaten out of him.

"What?" Simon prompted.

"I was just wondering…if…I mean, you seem to know a lot, about a lot of things, and…" Simon rolled his eyes and caught sight of Sherlock doing the same. He smirked. "I just wondered if you knew any more about - what happened, than was in the letter?" Martin managed to make eye contact with Mycroft for about a second after that.

Mycroft breathed in through his nose. "What sort of information were you hoping for?"

"I - I don't know. Anything, I suppose. I mean…why?"

Martin sounded miserable enough that for once, Simon actually felt like giving him a hug, but he wasn't going to here, not in front of these wankers.

"From what I have been able to discern, the reasoning as presented in your mother's letter was quite correct," Mycroft said. "There are further documents - a handful of letters passed between our mothers - which bear this out."

"Have you got them with you?" Martin asked, but he sat back in his seat when Mycroft shook his head.

"I'm afraid not. However, it's much the same sort of thing."

"What else is there that wasn't in the letter they got?" Simon asked, because he could tell there was other stuff there that Mycroft wasn't going to offer without being asked directly.

He was right. "The letters were sent after the arrangement had come to fruition, and so focused primarily upon the reactions of both families afterwards." Mycroft looked at Simon. "Your mother mentioned, for example, that you were most relieved to have acquired a baby brother who slept a lot more and wasn't constantly 'screaming the house down'."

Simon looked at Sherlock and tried to hide his smile, but Sherlock seemed more annoyed with Mycroft than with him anyway.

"Babies are supposed to scream, it's how they communicate that their needs aren't being met," Sherlock said, not fooling anyone with his fake dismissive tone. "At any rate, I'm glad I was intelligent enough to irritate you from the start."

"Actually," Mycroft said, and for the first time paid a bit of attention to his cup, though only to stir the liquid around, "you weren't. By which I mean, you weren't as irritable as you had been in your previous home."

"What? Why not?" Sherlock demanded.

"I believe," said Mycroft, now sounding a bit awkward and for once normal, "that you were more sufficiently stimulated in our home than you had been." He looked apologetically at Simon, who shrugged, and Martin, who just looked very miserable.

"They're all dead now. I'm not taking any responsibility for the shit they pulled," Simon said. He felt guilty for talking about his mum so harshly, especially with how recently she'd gone, but it was the truth.

"So what did you think of me?" Martin said suddenly, addressing Mycroft again. Simon could see this was not going to go well. "I mean, when I was - when I was your brother."

Mycroft paused before he replied. "I didn't have an awful lot to do with you," he said.

"But you did with Sherlock," Martin pressed. That hadn't been said, but you could read between the lines.

Mycroft nodded slowly. "I did," he said. "But you were very different babies. You needed a lot more sleep - no more than the norm, I'm advised; Sherlock is as usual an outlier - and you preferred not to be excessively stimulated."

Martin sighed, nodded, and dropped down about an inch on the bench. Simon looked at him, concerned, and wondered what he was supposed to do to make this better.

"Sounds like we got the better deal, then," he said, looking only at Martin. "Can you imagine him," he gestured to Sherlock, "at a family Christmas?"

Martin smiled weakly. Simon realised only after he'd said it that they hadn't actually had a family Christmas with all of them since before dad had died, but never mind. Sherlock would have probably been even worse as a child.

"It would have been preferable to ours," Sherlock said unexpectedly, lounging against the back of the bench. "I gather neither of you were ever forced to give a violin recital to a houseful of guests?"

"No, only the harp," Simon said, with a rough approximation of Sherlock's accent. Sherlock smirked in response. Martin looked worried.

Mycroft cleared his throat almost - but not quite - silently and said, "Do you have any musical aptitude, Martin?"

Simon was suddenly pissed off. He apparently knew everything about Martin's life anyway, so he knew damn well Martin had never played a musical instrument. "We couldn't afford to have lessons," he said before Martin could say anything. "I know some people get their own horse by the time they're two and a car when they're ten, but our mum and dad were a bit more worried about putting food on the table."

"Simon!" Martin said. Mycroft raised an eyebrow slightly. Sherlock didn't seem bothered.

"What?" Simon asked. "He doesn't get to put you down just because you can't play the fucking violin. If you'd had what he got," he pointed at Sherlock, "then probably you'd be playing in a bloody orchestra, but they did the best with what they had." He looked at Mycroft again, challenging him to say anything different.

"My apologies," Mycroft said, which Simon didn't buy for a second. "I didn't mean to imply anything about your family."

"Don't talk bollocks," Simon said, and felt a little bit better when he heard Sherlock laugh quietly. "You think you're so much better than us just because you've got money and a job in Parliament. You're lucky, I'll give you that, but you're not better."

"Simon!" Martin said again. "Stop being so rude!"

Simon turned in his seat. "What's up with you? He's only your brother 'cause of blood, you know, not anything else. He doesn't care about you. Why do you want to stick up for him?"

"I'm - I'm not," Martin said, going red again. "I just think - you're being unnecessarily rude, that's all."

Simon huffed a breath out in frustration. Martin was staring at his hands on the table, tearing a serviette into little shreds. Sherlock still just looked amused by it all, and Mycroft was trying to pretend he hadn’t just been totally called out. There probably weren't a lot of people who did that to him, and Simon was glad he'd been one of them.

The meeting didn't last too much longer after that. When Sherlock flat-out asked when they were going to leave, Mycroft tutted about his manners again but took it as a cue to wrap things up. Simon kept an eye on Martin, ready to jump in if he was going to do something really stupid like try to arrange another get-together, but thankfully he didn't, mostly kept his hands shoved in his pockets and his head down.

"Well, they were a barrel of laughs," Simon said, leaning against his car and watching the sleek black Mercedes take the two nobs away. "What do you think of your new big brother, then?"

Martin looked at him with that stupid unhappy face, and shook his head and got into his van. Simon figured that was that, then, and thank fuck.


	4. Chapter 4

Sherlock was halfway through a test involving boric acid and a client's shoes when John came home, so he ignored his flatmate in favour of proving his point. The point, in this case, was that the client was an idiot, because he was one of the sort who thought that by going to visit a detective he would automatically take himself off the list of suspects. Perhaps it would have worked if he'd had the foresight to employ a bad detective, but he hadn't, and so was going to be getting a visit from the police some time in the next couple of days (once John finally asked what the shoes in the bath were there for, and then insisted on telling Lestrade what Sherlock had found out).

John had learned relatively quickly when it was pointless trying to interact with Sherlock, so wandered around the flat taking off this and putting away that and musing out loud about what they could have for dinner, which was acceptable background noise.

When Sherlock was finished, he sat back in his chair for a moment, then got up to wash his hands. The proof was incredibly obvious but it had at least provided a momentary distraction.

"So how was it?" John asked him, leaning against the counter next to the sink.

Sherlock soaped between his fingers. "Tedious," he replied.

John continued, undeterred. "What did you think of your biological brother?"

"Not a lot," said Sherlock. "Though he was quite good at irritating Mycroft. That might come in handy."

"Mycroft got irritated with him?"

Sherlock smirked a little, remembering. "He accused him of talking bollocks."

John laughed at that. "So pissing off Mycroft obviously runs in the family, then. What about the other one?" He passed Sherlock the towel.

"The one I could have been? I could never have been him, no matter where I grew up."

John seemed to be waiting for him to add more, but when he didn't John didn't press. "Do you think you'll see either of them again?"

"It's possible," Sherlock allowed. "Fitton isn't so very far away from here."

"But not by choice."

"No." Sherlock turned to enter the living room, and John followed.

"Did you…feel anything, at all?"

"Yes, I told you. Tedium."

John rolled his eyes. "So it doesn't bother you, at all."

"Nope," Sherlock said airily, flicking a book on carbon dating out from the bookshelf with one finger and catching it in his hand.

"So why did you go?" It was as if it were impossible for John to believe he held no sentiment about this at all. Normal people did, therefore Sherlock must too, somewhere deep inside. Reasoning which was patently ridiculous.

"Mycroft owes me now," Sherlock said. "I didn't want to go but I did and now next time we require the immediate use of, say, a helicopter or a surface-to-air missile, we won't have any problems acquiring it."

"Oh, excellent," John nodded. "I was just thinking last night, actually, what this place needs to brighten it up a bit is a Starstreak or two."

"He only owes me one favour, John. Two missiles would put me in his debt, and that is not a good place to be."

* * * * *

Martin wasn't very fond of standby on any normal day, because it mostly entailed sitting around in the portacabin fending off Arthur's attempts to lure him into a game of charades and not being paid, either to fly an aeroplane or to move things about. The day after the awful meeting with the Holmes brothers, he was feeling even worse about being on standby because it meant being taunted by the possibility of flying without actually getting to do any to take his mind off things.

"Morning, Skip!" Arthur greeted him cheerily as he entered, which was both irritating and comfortingly familiar at the same time. "Coffee?"

"Thanks, Arthur," Martin said, crossing the room to sit behind the less broken of the two desks. He opted to leave his coat on.

Carolyn opened the door to her office. "Oh, you're here. How did yesterday go?" She went to the filing cabinet and rifled through a few things, and Martin felt slightly warm at the realisation that she was only pretending to have just noticed him, and to be asking him out of idle curiosity rather than caring. Carolyn wasn't very good at caring, especially not showing it, but it didn't mean she didn't.

The warm feeling left quickly when Martin considered her actual question. "Yesterday. It was…underwhelming."

"Where's Whelming?" Arthur asked, as the door opened to admit Douglas, bundled up in a huge puffy coat but probably at least warm.

Carolyn turned at the sound of the door opening then put a hand to her chest and gasped theatrically. "Can this be? A First Officer arriving on time? Douglas, you realise the clocks went back in October."

"I do apologise for causing you such consternation, Carolyn," Douglas replied, dodging Arthur with the kettle as he went to sit down, "but I simply happened to be in the area about this time, and I thought I might as well come to work once I was finished."

"Gosh, how privileged we all are," said Carolyn. "Now, Martin. What do you mean, underwhelming?"

Martin sighed. "It was just…I mean, I don't know what I was hoping for. Nothing, I suppose, in particular. It didn’t go very well. Simon and Mycroft didn't really get on."

"Your brother didn't get on with Mycroft? You do surprise me," Douglas said. "Arthur, make mine a tea, would you?"

"Yeah, they -" Martin stopped himself and pulled a face. "I think, anyway, I was probably better off growing up with Simon rather than him. With - any of them, I suppose." He felt it was true, but it still hurt to think that he hadn't actually managed to fit into his birth family - to the extent that they decided to swap him with a more suitable baby.

"Yes," drawled Douglas. "I'm trying to imagine you carrying off the name Sherlock and I have to say, Captain, it's proving rather difficult."

Martin didn't bother to get annoyed about that.

"Did the other you look like a Martin?" Arthur asked over his shoulder, stirring the drinks as he did and consequently splashing them over the worktop.

"The other him?" Carolyn queried.

"Yeah." Arthur carried the drinks over to the pilots, mugs dripping a bit. "The man who would have been him if he wasn't him."

"He's always been him," Douglas said.

"Yeah, but, not him him, has he? I mean, he's always been him, as in this man here…but he hasn't always been Martin. The other man was Martin first. So he's the other him."

"What an eloquent description of the situation. Martin, have you considered appointing Arthur to pen your biography?"

"Oh yeah, can I?"

"No!" Martin said. "I don't want any of this in a book. Sorry, Arthur. Anyway, his explanation makes about as much sense as the stupid plan in the first place."

"Do you have any idea why they actually went along with it? Your parents, I mean," Carolyn asked.

"Which ones?"

She faltered in trying to remember, and that just about summed the whole mess up. "Your - I think I mean your parents, Mr and Mrs Crieff. Yes, what possessed them to give their child away?"

Martin shrugged. "From what Mycroft said it was mostly because he was too loud. They wanted a quiet baby, one that was nice and slow and easy and didn't ever ask for anything because he was too stupid to-"

"Martin," Douglas interrupted him. "Far be it from me to stop you from berating yourself about the things you're bad at - of which there are many - but on this occasion, I think you might be being a bit hard on yourself. You're comparing yourself to someone who, if his brother - or, not brother - is any indication, is very, very clever. He's also a complete git, whereas you're…annoying in a different way."

"Thank you, Douglas," Martin said flatly. It was partly for show, though; he did appreciate Douglas's attempts at boosting his self-esteem. Especially as it was Douglas, who generally took great pleasure in showing all and sundry how much effortlessly better he was than Martin at pretty much everything. "He was really clever, too," he admitted. "He guessed all this stuff about Simon, like how many children he's got and what he does, and he was right about it all."

"Magician's tricks," said Douglas. "It's nothing special, they just word it in a way which gets you to give more details and it sounds like they knew all along."

But Martin shook his head, because it hadn't been like that at all. "No, he really did just…know it. It was right at the beginning before we'd barely said hello. It was pretty impressive."

Douglas still looked sceptical, but left it there.

"So, did he then?" Arthur asked, causing everyone to look at him in confusion.

"Did who what then?" Carolyn asked.

"Did the other one - Sherlock - did he look like a Martin?"

Martin thought about this for a very, very short amount of time, and then shook his head. "Nope," he said. "Nothing like."

"That must be one point for nurture over nature, then," Carolyn said. She'd closed the filing cabinet by now and was leaning against Douglas's desk, all pretences forgotten.

"Does that mean you nurtured Arthur into this?" Douglas asked.

"Just consider what would happen if I hadn't nurtured him at all," Carolyn said with a warning tone.

"I'm having difficulty imagining you nurturing-"

"Stop right there, Douglas, before I decide you can take over from me on the nurturing. I challenge you to live a week with him and not become bitingly sarcastic as a survival measure."

Martin sighed out loud without realising it. Carolyn talked a lot about how stupid Arthur was, told him to get out of her sight, and Douglas was right in that she'd never been anything close to nurturing…but she'd kept him. She'd brought him up and even in his twenties she was still living with him, _and_ working with him.

"Oh, Martin," Douglas said, startling him. "You're still thinking about it, aren't you?"

"Well, how would you feel if you were basically told you weren't good enough at six bloody months old?"

"You weren't good enough for a family who called their children Mycroft and Sherlock. Let's face it; _they_ probably weren't good enough for them when they were children. But you were good enough for your family, weren't you? They brought you up."

Martin wanted to just agree to this and have that be it, but it didn't make him feel as comforted as it should. "Yes, but…I still…"

"What?" prompted Carolyn.

"I still don't fit there," Martin said quietly. "Not properly, anyway. They all think I'm useless and I'll never amount to anything. I mean, mum and dad are both dead now but you know what happened when dad died, he gave me the van, and Simon was always mum's golden boy, always. And now they've got kids of their own, proper families and proper jobs and I'm just…" He stopped because he was not going to cry on top of everything else. Admitting how he felt was humiliating enough, but there wasn't anyone else he could say it to and he needed to get it out.

"Well, you've got us," Arthur said matter-of-factly.

Martin took a couple more breaths to compose himself before he looked up. "What?"

"Well, you might not have a family with like a wife and kids and everything, but you've got us, and we're sort of like a family, aren't we?"

"What a chilling thought," Douglas said.

"Precisely," added Carolyn, raising her eyebrows at him, but Martin got the sense that neither of them really meant it.

"Yes," Martin said quietly. "I suppose so." He kept his eyes on Arthur, who was smiling at the thought of cheering him up, and thought that actually, Arthur - and even Douglas and Carolyn - were better than Mycroft and Samuel and _Melliflua_ any day.


	5. Chapter 5

In mid-March, Carolyn phoned her pilots with the news that they had a last-minute trip to Lyon booked, and should be at the airfield in half an hour.

This didn't go down too well, but some time within the next hour or so all the crew were there, and Martin and Douglas were in the cabin performing the post-takeoff checks when Arthur entered.

"Roger, Golf Tango India," Carl said over the radio. "Bring me back some nice cheese."

The pilots ignored that directive. "Post takeoff checks complete," Martin said. "Arthur, why are you here so early? Shouldn't you be offering the passenger a drink or something?"

"Er, well, I did," Arthur said, "but he told me he wanted to speak to you instead."

Martin frowned. "Did he?"

"Yeah," said Arthur. "He asked to speak to the Captain, and he hasn't seen either of you so he definitely meant you."

"Thank you, Arthur," Martin said, rolling his eyes. "Did he say why?"

"Nope. He's a bit weird, though. He's still wearing his coat and his scarf, and when I asked him when he got on the plane what he was going to do in Lyon, he said, 'Nothing at all, hopefully'."

"What time is the return flight?" Martin asked, getting up from his seat.

Douglas checked the briefing notes which had been shoved into their hands as they boarded, instead of being delivered orally as usual. "Um - twenty minutes after we arrive, looks like."

He and Martin frowned at one another. Arthur bounced on the balls of his feet. "Shall I tell him you're coming, Skip?"

"Yes, thanks Arthur," Martin said, and followed him into the cabin.

"The Captain's coming," Arthur said to the passenger Martin couldn't see yet. "In fact, he has come, here he is."

"I can see that," replied the passenger, and Martin stopped in shock as he recognised the voice and the face of Sherlock Holmes. "Now, would you be so kind as to remove yourself from my presence for the rest of the flight?"

"Righto," said Arthur cheerfully, and headed back to the flight deck.

"You're flying to Lyon?" Martin said, still stopped a few feet away from Sherlock.

"It would appear so," Sherlock replied. "I hope you'd be the one to know."

Martin coloured. "Yes," he said, raising his chin, "I do. We're flying to Lyon. Why do you want to go there?"

"I don't," Sherlock said. "This was the easiest way of speaking to you, however."

"Really?" Martin blurted. "Chartering an aeroplane was the easiest way to have a conversation?"

Sherlock didn't look at all ruffled. "When Mycroft is your brother, you need to take some quite large steps to remain undetected." Martin shifted awkwardly. "As you no doubt know, by now."

"Mycroft isn't my brother," Martin said, keeping his voice even.

Sherlock considered him. "He'll never turn up to your family reunions," he agreed, "but you're on his radar, now. Don't worry about it, he's not usually malicious. Not unless he wants something."

Martin finally sat down in the seat across the aisle from Sherlock. "That really doesn't make me feel very reassured."

"It wasn't meant to," Sherlock told him. "Far better for you to know what you're up against rather than live in blissful ignorance." Martin still looked disturbed, and he added, "But really, he's unlikely to ever even contact you."

"What did you want to talk about?" Martin asked.

Sherlock crossed his legs in the small space, somehow managing to keep the move graceful. "What was your childhood like?" he asked.

"You already know."

"No," Sherlock shook his head, "I don't mean the baby swapping fiasco. I mean when you were older, the bits you remember. Did you enjoy it?"

"Yes, I suppose so," said Martin. "It wasn't anything special but I didn't hate it or anything."

"A ringing endorsement," Sherlock said. "Well, you would have hated mine."

"How do you know?"

"I lived it," said Sherlock simply. "The crushing self-doubt you carry around with you is nothing compared to what it would have been had you grown up in my household. You are not a Holmes, Martin Crieff, and for that you should be thankful."

Martin frowned. "How do you know? I could have been if I'd had what you had, the - public schools and the money and the-"

"No," Sherlock interrupted him, "you couldn't. That's not an insult, that's a fact. Equally, however, I could not have been you." Surprise registered on Martin's face, and Sherlock continued when it became clear he didn't know what to say. "There are relatively few people who understand me, if there are any at all. There are also an incredibly small number who accept me. However, had I tried to fit into the mould of your life, your family, I don't doubt that number would have been even smaller. Quite possibly zero."

Martin's eyes left Sherlock's face several times as though he couldn't manage to keep them there. Sherlock continued, "I will never be normal, I am not interested in being normal, and you are excellent at being normal."

"I'm pretty rubbish at it, actually," Martin countered. "I almost didn't make it as a pilot."

"And that is exactly what makes you normal. Most people are pretty rubbish at most things they actually want to do. However, the fact that you kept on trying says something."

"Yeah. I'm an idiot."

Sherlock smiled. "I won't disagree with you there, though that's not what I meant."

Martin looked confused. "Right. Thanks? I think."

Sherlock nodded once, then settled back in his reclined seat and closed his eyes, folding his hands in his lap. Martin stood up and made his way back to the flight deck, but was stopped before the door by Sherlock's voice.

"In seven weeks' time my flatmate and I shall be required to fly to Sydney to solve a number of blackmail cases. I'll text you the details closer to the time."

"Oh," said Martin. "All right." He paused. "Why in seven weeks' time?"

"Because that's when the G20 are meeting. Get any number of high-profile politicians in one place and you're guaranteed to find some blackmail. Terribly dull, on the whole."

"So why are you doing it?"

"Because when Mycroft finds out I used his credit card to pay for this journey, that's what he'll want. And John won't let me say no."

Martin returned to his flying; Sherlock returned to his thinking. Overall, the world made sense that way.

**Author's Note:**

> I adore concrit.


End file.
